Stay tuned, nitotemak

I can't make any firm promises, but I wanna do an experiment in very basic language curriculum development via this much neglected site.

Stay tuned.

Cree gets Digital

Recently stumbled upon a on-line resource intended for second-language learners, the Cree-Innu Linguistic Atlas.

Using a Google mash-up of sorts, it's a clickable map that lets you hear how different dialects of Cree handle various phrases in categories ranging from the usual 'Family' and 'Greetings,' to the more conversational 'Physical characteristics' and 'Comforts and discomforts.'

Very cool, and it's nice to see (and hear) someone take a pan-Cree approach to language promotion.

CreeTube?

One day -- how often that phrase comes out of my mouth when it comes to Cree -- I would love to post a bunch of Cree lessons on YouTube.

For now though, I guess I can just send people to the videos of others.

For example:

Facebook group on Cree language

Herte's a cool idea I wish I had thought of first but super happy someone beat me to it: a Cree language group on Facebook entitled "Nêhiyawêwin (Cree) Word of the Day." (I still absolutely love Facebook even though some say it's had its day.)

This group is just one way people are trying to mobilize the web as a teaching/learning technology for indigenous language and I am all for it. For our languages to thrive, they must be in play wherever people do.

ay-ay!

Rick

National anthem sung in Cree

Tansi nitotemak:

A great story by CBC's Connie Walker about Akina Shirt, the young woman who sang the national anthem in Cree at a hockey game broadcast by Hockey Night in Canada.



Coincidentally, her home reserve is Saddle Lake, one of a number of communities who jointly own the Blue Quills First Nations College. Blue Quills is where I took Cree. Maybe Akina will one day be a student there...

ay-ay,
Rick

What Cree Needs Most

I am such a slacker on this blog.

Lest it be shut down for inactivity, however, I will share in brief an idea -- an ideal -- I have long held about what Cree needs most for it to regain a greater currency.

Two words: fluent rappers. Young people who speak the language effortlessly and artfully to a phat backbeat. (Do people even use the word "phat" anymore? Omigod, that is so 2003!)

But the odds are against it, frankly. And I don't know what's harder: to train someone who speaks the language well in the ways of rap, or to take a great (unilingually-English) rapper and teach them how to speak Cree.

But if our goal is to attract youth to the language, or to encourage those who do speak it to keep speaking, we need to find and develop the Nehiyaw equivalent of Jay-Z. Who knows, though: maybe that talented younger woman or man is already out there, just waiting to be called to the stage, with "Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together for Jay-CREE!!!"

ekosi,
Rick

Calling all Cree in Winnipeg

My oh my, it has been ages since I posted to this site.

It has been roughly just as long since I have actively engaged anyone else in Cree.

The main reason for this: my relocation, back to Winnipeg, Manitoba, a good 15 hours' drive away.

Oddly enough, there are probably, numerically speaking, far more Cree speakers in this city of roughly 700,000 people than there are back in St. Paul where I was taking my courses. But the fact is, the vast majority of them remain a mystery to me because the lingua franca of this burg is predominantly English. What courses do exist here are more or less piecemeal, the very reason I had to leave Winnipeg to find a decent Cree program in the first place.

But now that I have a partial base in the language, there are things I can do myself. Number one: start my own Cree speakers' group here in Winnipeg. That is, help set up a regular circle of new, intermediate and advanced speakers who seek a supportive environment to develop in Cree.

If that sounds like you, or someone you know, drop me a comment here and I'll be in touch soon!

ay-ay,
Rick